A developer couldn't get a application performance monitoring (APM) tool to trace his application. They claimed that their libraries and their configurations were alright and that the APM tool was non-performant.

The developer then argues with sysadmin that the APM tool can't trace the application and that there's nothing wrong with the application or the configurations. When sysadmin questions whether the developer got the tool to work anywhere, they say, "No" and head off to make it work at least in one place. They come back saying that it works on their development environment (which is their local machine). Sysadmin claims that the system configurations on the server instances cannot be matched by the development environment and there could be a lot more factors to be considered for the problem. The sysadmin asks to prove it on a server instance on one of the test environments and then they'd agree that it is a problem with the tool. They also argue that this is not the only application that uses the APM tool and the tool happily traces other applications with no issues.

The developer tries the same configuration on a staging instance and fails. In order to make it work, they silently uninstall the existing version of the APM tool and then compiles an unstable branch of the tool. It finally works with this version.

They go back to the sysadmin and show that it works on the staging environment, but does not on production. After banging their head on the wall for a while, the sysadmin figure that the tool had been swapped out for the unstable branch that was manually compiled. When questioned, the developer responds, "It works with this version on staging, so deploy the same version on production"

WTF? You don't deploy an unstable branch to production. Just because you can't make it work on the stable branch doesn't mean that it is the problem with the tool itself. There's a big difference between a stable branch and a non-stable branch. How would you feel if the sysadmin retorted by asking you to deploy the staging branch of your application to production?